Stitching Love Stories from a Torn Land: Mehak Jamal’s LOAL KASHMIR
Mehak Jamal’s Loal Kashmir (2025) is a witness, a tender archive of what it means to love in a region of conflict—how intimacy reshapes itself around checkpoints, how longing endures without signal bars, how the heart insists on ordinary joys in extraordinary times.
ishq par zor nahīñ hai ye vo ātish ‘ġhālib’
ki lagā.e na lage aur bujhā.e na bane
Love, Ghalib reminds us, is never a choice. It arrives unbidden and burns on its own terms. As a hopeless romantic, I always thought I understood the weight of the sher above. But it was only while reading Mehak Jamal’s Loal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land (Fourth Estate India, 2025) that the verse began to ring differently. In a landscape where the future is so unpredictable and the present is rearranged by curfews, shutdowns, and silence, love is not merely a thing of passion. It becomes an act of subversion, of survival, of continuity.
Loal Kashmir is a collection of sixteen stories of ‘loal’, the Kashmiri word for love and longing, told against the backdrop of the most turbulent decades in the region’s recent history. It would be reductive to call it just a book of romances. In its essence, Loal Kashmir is a witness, a tender archive of what it means to love in a region of conflict—how intimacy reshapes itself around checkpoints, how longing endures without signal bars, how the heart insists on ordinary joys in extraordinary times.
Love in this book is not a rose blooming in bloodied snow; that would be too dramatic. Instead, it is a resilient creeper, inching through cracks, patient enough to grow around the barbed wires, strong enough to bear the emotional weight of a people in limbo.
The book is divided into three parts: Otru (the early 1990s, marked by the onset of militancy), Rath (2008 onwards, post-Amarnath land row), and Az (the aftermath of Article 370’s abrogation and the prolonged communication blackout that followed). While the timelines shifts, the emotional weather in Kashmir remains the same. Year after year, what strikes the most is the sameness of the longing—how decades passed but the absence of normalcy remains familiar. Love, that stubborn climber, takes root in each era.
Jamal collects voices that speak of love in all its plural forms—familial, platonic, conflicted, thwarted. “No one ever asks us about this,” she is often told. Loal Kashmir is her way of asking, and making us listen too. It cracks open a different register of Kashmir where it is shown as a place of care, humour, teenage crushes, and yearning.
Some of the most moving stories in the book reveal how love finds the hairline cracks—those moments of warmth, even in curfewed lives. In “Love Letter,” Javed is saved during a crackdown because the soldiers find a folded love note in his pocket. Him reading the letter aloud to the formidable creatures he believes soldiers to be, provides them a pause. A reminder of human connection, or perhaps something their own heart knew.
These are not stories that rail against the conflict directly. Instead, they grow around it, as things do in lived reality. Lovers become strategists. They steal glances in Matador rides, fix timings for landline calls, avoid getting caught, walk across their lover’s lane for just one look. The stakes are high, and yet the gestures are as ordinary as anywhere else. This is precisely the author’s intention, that love insists on being ordinary even when nothing else is. The stories reveal the remarkable inventiveness of Kashmiris. When the communication channels are cut off and movements are curtailed, they go old-school: letters, landlines, paper planes, and taping phones together to simulate a three-way call.
Even in the stories set in the suffocating months after August 2019, this ingenuity persists. In “Ambulance,” Khawar and Iqra are engaged, but the lockdown silences even the most basic forms of connection. They resort to written letters, passed on by ambulance drivers and matchmakers. In “I Will Walk to You If I Have To,” a couple on the cusp of marriage uses every bit of resourcefulness—early morning meetings, sympathetic friends, odd-hour errands—to make the smallest of arrangements possible. These aren’t grand Laila-Majnu stories, but they carry a pulse of resilience.
Love, in some stories, must scale steeper walls shaped by brutal architectures of identity, religion and geography. In “Roohani,” Asad, a trans man, navigates not only the lockdown but his own becoming. He loves Haika, the only person who sees him fully, yet he cannot reach her. Asad says, “In Kashmir, you don’t know about the next minute... What can I tell you about my future?” (193) It is a devastating admission. Not because it is dramatic, but because it is matter-of-fact. In “Matador,” a Kashmiri Pandit boy, Sagar, falls for a Muslim girl, Aalmeen. The delicate line they toe remains shadowed by fear. Sagar quickly learns not to reveal his full name, to always look over his shoulder. These are unfortunate adaptations they have built to navigate their lives.
What also resides in the margins of the book is the specific weight that women often carry when love collides with duty, honour, or expectations. Jamal doesn’t name this burden explicitly. It is rather tightly coiled in the contours of longing. The stakes of love are never evenly distributed. For women, they often include the forfeiture of home, kinship, and even selfhood.
In “Home is Where the Heart Is,” Bushra is a woman caught in bureaucratic limbo. She’s deceived by her husband, and stranded far from her family. She keeps her hope alive and longs for the day when she can return to her homeland in POK. “Agli Hartal” offers a different but related texture of gendered yearning. Nadiya seeks marriage as both an expression of love and an escape from the stifling surveillance of her conservative natal home. Her desire is practical, urgent, and deeply familiar in South Asian contexts—love as a strategy to seek room to breathe. Even this escape route is narrow in Kashmir, watched over by teachers, parents, curfews. The love that promises freedom still must navigate the fragile reputations.
Jamal collects voices that speak of love in all its plural forms—familial, platonic, conflicted, thwarted. “No one ever asks us about this,” she is often told. Loal Kashmir is her way of asking, and making us listen too. It cracks open a different register of Kashmir where it is shown as a place of care, humour, teenage crushes, and yearning.
“Doraemon” captures the longing is for normalcy, for the mundane rituals of youth that elsewhere pass unnoticed. Mahak, in her early twenties, speaks with a clarity that unsettles: “In Kashmir,” she says,
we look forward to our college years. We don’t get that much freedom in school, like they do outside. So, all we hope for in college is at least to have the liberty to bunk classes, hang out with friends and spend those hours building bonds of love, connection and enjoyment. That's what we get in Kashmir. That’s all we are given here. (201)
The desire to not get robbed of making memories runs through many of the stories in the collection. Longing, in this book, isn’t just for people. It’s for safety, for routine, for the right to call someone, and to know they’ll answer. The book may not always linger in complexity, but it clings to the beating heart of its subject: Love as a stubborn act of hope, a form of agency in a space where even basic freedoms are rationed. As Mahak says in “Doraemon”:
We can’t control death. That is inevitable. But what is within our reach is love-loving the people we can and showing our love to them. When we aren’t given the freedom to profess our love, it is the worst kind of cruelty; a crime against a people. Love is humanity, it is everything, existing beyond borders, beyond language. We have seen curfews and lockdowns-and each of them leads to a curfew on love. Love gets caged. A lock is put on it. And yet-here’s the miracle-despite the obstacles that do exist, people continue to love, they don’t forget each other. (207)
There is an emotional power in Jamal’s lens but several stories, especially in the final section, begin to blur together. We read of lockdowns, of thwarted weddings, of calls that wouldn’t go through. While each narrative stands well on its own—benefiting from Jamal’s filmmaking background—as a collection, they run the risk of merging into a single, generalized portrait.
At times, the book also shies away from exploring the emotional consequences it gestures toward. In “Kashmiri in Gaza,” for instance, Laila’s decision to marry a Palestinian man and move to Gaza means trading one conflict zone for another. The psychic toll of it is never examined with the depth it warrants. We are told that Laila longs for her family’s warmth, but not how that longing shapes her days.
And yet, Loal Kashmir carries a deep emotional charge. Some moments are heartbreaking, others quietly triumphant, and many leave the reader simply sitting with their weight. The real intimacy of the collection is in how it turns our attention to the pulse of everyday lives in Kashmir, of the people caught behind the headlines. Jamal is clearly aware of the political weight her stories carry. In privileging emotional immediacy—the flutter of a first love, the pain of separation, the resilience of courtship—the book sometimes glosses over the structural and systemic violence that shapes these experiences. While it can risk flattening the complexities of life in a conflict zone into a series of bittersweet memories, it also insists that tenderness itself can be a form of resistance.
Jamal says that Kashmir belongs to lovers, and Loal Kashmir is her love letter to the region. In it she has collected the debris of interrupted lives and arranged them into small altars of feelings. In doing so, it asserts that love—however fragile, however fleeting—is worth documenting. That longing is a language too. It only needs to be heard.
***
Shivani Patel is a writer and book reviewer based in Delhi. She writes about books, memories, and the emotional fine print of being human. Her reviews have appeared in Scroll and Feminism in India. Find her on Instagram @vani_in_wonderland_.